The Thirteenth Tale Has Us Talking About Ghosts

Considering all the rain we are hoping for in the next few hours, I guess we can be glad we had such picture-perfect weather for our meeting on Monday. The weather looked perfect! Too bad we had to experience the feel of it!

We had a great turnout, as usual, with mostly big fans of the new author, Diane Setterfield, and The Thirteenth Tale. I forgot to ask for a thumbs up/thumbs down vote, but I got the feeling everyone liked the book.

The Thirteenth Tale: Please note that this section may contain spoilers, so don't read it if you are still planning to finish the book and don't want any help. There was some indication among the group that a little help might be good even when reading this book for the first time! This was one of those books that some of us have read more than once and many of us would like to read again to get the details and convoluted plot ironed out. We had some discussion about our feelings as to whether a book should or should not require taking notes or creating a character tree or timeline for understanding. I think you have to decide that for yourself!

Did you go home and look up "amanuensis" online? I looked at onelook.com. It had links to 29 places to get the definition. TMI. Can the Internet be too big already?

I'm going to summarize our discussion of this book by listing questions that came up about the book during our discussion. Readers had questions throughout their reading, and then we had questions while discussing the book. Even those few who had read the book more than once didn't seem to feel that they had yet plumbed the depths of The Thirteenth Tale. Questions that we were unable to answer conclusively during our discussion: (1) Who were the original twins' parents? (2) Who was pulled from the fire? (3) Were there really ghosts in the story, and if so, who were they? I think we mostly answered the third question. I thought I knew the answer to the first question, and the text might contain it, but discussion seemed to indicate that this question was left somewhat open, as was the second question.

We were impressed by this author in general and especially because this was her first book! Apparently, the book impressed the publishers when it was written, because there was a bidding war and the author made close to $3 million between the British and American releases., which is very rare, especially for first novels. We found the story compelling, the vocabulary impressive, and the tale to be well designed and fascinating. The characters were interesting and well-developed, and there were lots of teasers and mysteries throughout the story!